Team Pinpoint joined hundreds of merchants, technology and solutions partners, as well as developers at Meet Magento UK 2019 #MM19UK. A whole day event, this year’s Meet Magento UK had two tracks – merchant and developer; a great addition to the programme that ensured talks were much more audience focussed.
Head of Development, Douglas Radburn, shared his experience of yet another Magento event, pulling out his highlights of the day:
Magento Contribution Day
Before the main conference, we were delighted to take part in the Magento Contribution Day held at DotDigital’s central London office. Bringing together key Magento figures with seasoned developers from agencies and partners alike, this event saw everyone working toward common goals such as to build new features, squash bugs, QA existing pull requests and help with Magento documentation. Essentially, we got to contribute to the platform we all love, submitting three pull requests, working on tickets and even answering client emails thorough out the day.
Onto the Conference…
Contributing completed, it was on to the main event! After an introduction and opening notes from event organisers JH and an update from the Magento Association, Adobe’s Ramadass Prabhakar presented an overview of Magento’s roadmap for next quarter and beyond. Trust us when we tell you there’s some exciting announcements on the horizon… but that’s all we can say for now!
Settling into the technical track for the rest of the day, we refuelled with quick coffee breaks, ready to absorb talks from leading experts. Here’s a taste of what the day held…
Performance Budgets: Get Fast, Stay Fast
The first talk of the day came from Google’s Katie Hempenius who she spoke on a very important subject – Performance Budgets. She provided an interesting overview on which performance metrics you should be looking at, why, and how you can leverage these results to deliver better experiences to your users.
Essentially, it’s really important to know what Google Lighthouse is measuring and what each metric means. Then, it’s a case of keeping on top of it and making sure incremental improvements on your site don’t impact that score dramatically.
Practical Magento Security for Managers and Marketeers
David Deppner from Psyberware was up next. He covered case studies on compromised Magento stores, providing practical tips that make sure care and attention is taken from all sides when working on a Magento solution. From making sure your admin passwords are secure and passwords aren’t reused, to ensuring that your backup retention and penetration detection is checked and tested regularly, the talk provided lots of useful tips to help minimise business risks.
Stop Refreshing the @#$%&! Indexes
Following a short break, John Hughes from Fisheye took to the stage. His talk tackled how Magento handles indexes as well as issues that can quickly impact performance when trying to rectify issues with reindexing. Sharing tips and tricks aplenty, he also provided a deep dive into Magento’s database structure and how to schedule reindexing functions at a table-level behind the scenes.
After all that, our rumbling stomachs were telling us it was time for lunch!
Automated Resting – Plans, Platforms and Marketplace Extensions
Suitably stuffed, we made our way to listen to Lead Quality Engineer at Magento, Tom Erskine. He talked about the new Magento Functional Testing Framework, touching upon how it can be used to automate some types of testing to make sure that there isn’t regression in the core product. This session also looked at how the tool will be used by Magento Marketplace, providing a test suite for tech partners. Moving forward, this will make sure that submission to Marketplace is a smooth process and reduce the amount of re-work required.
10 Tips to Get the Most of Your Dev Team
Next up, Antonija Tadic from Interactive4. This was a great, practical session that explored how to get the best from your development team. Tips such as making sure that your staff are empowered and encouraged to ask questions of the wider team (preferably ahead of actioning something) could be applied to departments within web development as well as your wider businesses.
GraphQL
Wrapping up the technical track, Sergii Ivashchenko, Sr. Software Engineer at Adobe, Magento Community Engineering, spoke about GraphQL API Implementation, Extension and Utilization within Magento. We found this to be a great project overview which showed where coverage within the next few versions of Magento is heading.
Last But By No Means Least
As the conference came to a close, we enjoyed a keynote from Phillip Jackson, a well-known face at conferences and within all things Magento. His keynote outlined his personal journey over the past few years, how that is reflected within the Magento community, the changes we’re facing since the Adobe acquisition and the continuing roadmap.
Yet another fantastic event, this years’ Meet Magento was full of useful insights, new feature reveals, fresh ideas and ways of working which we will definitely be sharing with the rest of team Pinpoint. Magento has experienced a lot of big change since the last event, settling into their acquisition by Adobe, but it was clear to see that this partnership is making them stronger than ever, with even more exciting advancements still to come!
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